Documentary telling the double-edged story of the grave risks we pose to our own survival in the
name of progress. With rich imagery the film connects financial collapse, growing inequality and
global oligarchy with the sustainability of mankind itself. The film explores how we are repeatedly
destroyed by 'progress traps' - alluring technologies which serve immediate need but rob us of our
long term future. Featuring contributions from those at the forefront of evolutionary thinking such
as Stephen Hawking and economic historian Michael Hudson. With Martin Scorsese as executive
producer, the film leaves us with a challenge - to prove that civilisation and survival is not the
biggest progress trap of them all.

Produced in 2011 by Cinémaginaire, Film Progreso and Invisible Hand Productions Inc
in co-production with The National Film Board of Canada.

BBC Site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jrlsf  

“We are essentially stone-age hunters running 21st century software – our knowledge – on hardware that hasn’t been upgraded for 50,000 years, and this lies at the core of many of our problems.”

"Things that start out to seem like improvements or progress, these things are very seductive; it seems like there's no downside to these. But when they reach a certain scale they turn out to be dead ends or traps. I came up with the term 'progress trap' to define human behaviours that seem to be good things, seem to provide benefits in the short term, but which ultimately lead to disaster because they are unsustainable. One example would be - going right back into the old stone age - the time when our ancestors were hunting mammoths. They reached a point when their weaponry and their hunting techniques got so good that they destroyed hunting as a way of life throughout most of the world. The people who discovered how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made real progress. But people who discovered that they could eat really well by driving a whole herd over a cliff and kill two hundred at once had fallen into a progress trap; they had made too much progress."

- Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress